This review in the Guardian has really made me want to read Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artist and the Imagination From Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris.From the review, written by Kathryn Hughes:
They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.
I love this inter-war period of art and literature in all of its many beautiful and varied forms. I'll definitely be getting my hands on a copy of this.
The Toronto Film Festival starts tomorrow and I'm enormously excited and prepared to exist on very little sleep for the next ten days. I have tickets to 20 films, with a four day, two time zone business trip sandwiched in the middle of it - I'm literally leaving one film to go straight to the airport. However, I love the rushing around and this year I really lucked out and got almost all of my top choices. I'll be avoiding most of the big Hollywood films that will show up later in theatres, but I had to make an exception for Colin Firth's new movie, The King's Speech. He plays George VI, forced to become king after his brother's abdication and terrified of public speaking because of his stammer. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen Mum. It's already getting some early Oscar buzz.
, translated by Alison Anderson. was a no-brainer. This sounds like a wonderful read about a Paris bookstore that only offers literary masterpieces as chosen by a top-secret committee, who subsequently are mysteriously targeted and threatened. This is published by the wonderful Europa Editions, one of a handful of presses whose publishing choices I trust implicitly. So I also picked up 
The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leïla Marouane. It doesn't take much for me to pick up a book with Paris in the title, but this story of an Algerian man looking for an apartment and sexual encounters, narrated by an unsympathetic female, really intrigued me.
man trying to write a novel about a love affair. I'm normally quite skeptical about the review blurbs that get plastered onto the first pages of paperbacks, but this one from the Village Voice sold me: "The palettte of Davis's novel reminded me of green tea, bone, quartz light, and dried apricots, and its French room tone buzzes with the obsessiveness of Michel Leiris, the saltwater air of Jane Bowles and the grouchy who-cares-a-damn silence of Jean Rhys."
his latest C. When I read a review that suggested C was inspired by McCarthy's interest in Tintin, well mine was also piqued. Since these cartoons first appeared in 1929, they are clearly a part of the cultural history of the time and I'm curious to read all about them. 
I'm back. It's been a hot, muggy summer (never my favourite season), and I've spent a good chunk of it lying lazily on my couch, under the ceiling fan, watching DVDS in the dark. Too sluggish to blog, I'm afraid, although I've also been busy with all the various festivals in and around the city. Highlight of the Toronto Jazz Festival was seeing the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the master just as nimble on the keys as ever - at nearly ninety! Best production at the Shaw Festival this summer was Shaw's own The Doctor's Dilemma, though I also very much enjoyed their production of Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus, even though the lead was miscast. Lots of great cabaret at the Toronto Fringe Festival this year too which was a terrific addition to their usual fare.
- now gives me the privilege of buying tickets at $9.00 a pop!). I certainly won't be going there 3-5 times a week any more, which I'll really miss, but prices and principles will prevail. 
as so heartbreakingly beautiful and touching, I'm not sure if it wasn't my favourite after all. 
munications networks and contains a wonderful chapter describing the aerial aspects of the First World War. Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat is my first venture into contemporary steampunk, but I loved this political adventure story set in the utopian city of New Venice, complete with suffragettes, wicked magicians, mysterious dreams, a Polar Kangaroo and even the odd zombie. It was like an adult version of Philip Pullman with lots of clever word play and northern lore. And this 
weekend I started a wonderful novel about the inevitable changes that occur on the island of Guernsey, through two world wars and their aftermath. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards is a touching and very funny tale narrated by an elderly, lonely and opinionated man, nostalgic for a way of life that has disappeared with the advent of tourists and television on his beloved island. It's the perfect book to end the summer with. 
cks away from the University of Toronto campus. It does have a name that's hard to remember - Of Swallows, Their Deeds and The Winter Below, which partially explains the delay. I'd seen a newspaper article announcing its opening and made a mental note, but then promptly forgot the name. Then it was featured in the latest issue of Toronto Life magazine as one of the "50 Reasons to Love Toronto Now". So I jotted down the address and popped over there with a friend this afternoon. It's located on the second floor of a nondescript building. The walls are painted dark grey and one's eyes are immediately drawn to a striking red velvet couch against one wall. The books are still being unpacked but there were enough on the shelves to warrant a good browse. Literary criticism, philosophy, film, classics and religion seem to be the main categories of focus. And yes, of course I couldn't resist picking up these two books:
I was born in Hull but left when I was still a baby and almost anything you read about the city has to do with Philip Larkin which is just fine with me as I quite like his poetry. Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me by Jean Hartley promises not only to detail Larkin's early years in Hull and his relationship with a small press (I always love reading publishing memoirs) but also to describe the Hull of the 1950s and 1960s which hopefully will give me a sense of what my birthplace was like just prior to my arrival. Plus I was completely drawn to the cover - it's a photo of Larkin in front of a new library site in 1958. As to the second book, I have a number of titles in The German Library Series, mostly collections by German playwrights, but I was enticed to buy this anthology because it contains an excerpt from After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. I've read and enjoyed The Artificial Silk Girl and Child of All Nations and want more! There are also pieces by other German writers I'm interested in, including Ernst Junger and Gregor Von Rezzori.
With university bookstores carrying fewer books and certainly not offering the range from university presses that they used to - preferring to concentrate on t-shirts and electronics instead - it's really exciting to have this new used bookstore in the city. There's a good interview with the proprietor Jason Rovito in NOW Magazine which you can read here. I really like his philosophy - that a bookshop should be the centre of an academic community. Absolutely! But it takes skilled staff who actually love books, do the research needed to buy and stock intelligently, and who can foster good working relationships with faculty and students. As Rovito says in the NOW article, “Our gamble was that there was something that can’t be translated into electronic space in terms of bookselling. There’s a physical component that’s essential to the act. Part of that is the book itself as an actual object[...]but also talking about books, and the act of writing itself.”
"Just call it 283 College St, " said Rovito as I was leaving with my purchases, after having commented on the long name. I wish him luck and hope he can make a go of it - I'll certainly be returning.
de (1929) or The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), you are really missing a treat. I just bought George Bernard Shaw on Film which consists of 1941's Major Barbara starring the imperious Wendy Hiller, 1945's Caesar and Cleopatra starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh (which I've never seen and I'm a huge Vivien Leigh fan!) and 1952's Androcles and the Lion.
Sacha Guitry plays four roles in this multilingual whirlwind of pageantry that investigates the fate of three pearls missing from the royal crown of England. Pearls rockets through four centuries of European history with imaginative, winking irreverence.
This amazing movie is finally available on DVD. The New York Times did a review of the package and lauds the restoration of the film and the deep colours it now has. Oh, how can anyone forget that wonderful scene of Hepburn and Bogart trying to push that boat through the swamp. Can't wait to watch it again.
The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh
A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War by David Boyd Haycock
A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton
Just love this post from Conversational Reading about a great event hosted by San Francisco's The Booksmith that combines a bookswap with a meet and greet and three hours of bookish talk!
I went to see Soulpepper's production of Billy Bishop Goes To War last week. It's incredible that the two creators and performers - Eric Peterson and John Gray - have been reviving this play over the last few decades ever since it was first written in 1978. You can see Peterson at the top in the first production which graces the jacket of the published play and below it, a photo from Soulpepper's current production. I saw a performance in 1998 at Canstage and was delighted to see it again. Told through a series of reminiscences interspersed with original songs, this is the story of Canada's WWI flying ace Billy Bishop, who rather bumbled his way into becoming one of the most successful fighter pilots of the war, shooting down 72 planes, winning the Victoria Cross and against all odds - actually surviving the war, dying in his sleep at the age of 62. You can see a snippet of the play from this trailer. 
If you ever visit Chicago, a trip to the Seminary Co-op Bookstore near the University of Chicago is a must. You can seriously and deliriously get lost in its labyrinth-like underground corridors of books. (You can see some photos at this blog post). They also have a terrific website with its Front Table feature that replicates a physical display of new books and staff picks (you click on the thumbnail of the book and you can read more about it) and they are always posting interesting staff reviews and interviews. And in this day and age when so many university bookstores have reduced their trade sections in favour of installing cell-phone outlets and expanding their t-shirt lines, I use their website as a major source of information on new books published by university presses. In short it's everything an independent bookstore should be - a browsing paradise for its local community with knowledgeable staff , and savvy enough to reach out to booklovers on the internet (it's been years since I've visited - I used to go as a bookseller when Book Expo America was held in the city).
Yep - I want one! My current MAC notebook is about six years old and is needs to be replaced soon and I think it will be with this new iPad which seems to do everything I currently use my computer for - at a much lesser price. It'll be great for travelling and looks to be small and light enough to lug around in my rather large purse. While I probably won't use it much as an e-reader (except on planes), I think the screen is large enough to watch movies and TV comfortably. I also really like the fact that the keyboard/stand is also apparently a charger as well. Now we'll just have to wait and see how long it will take for them to be sold in Canada.
d feel like I was crossing a lot of cultural borders and travelling back and forth between various books. I got a surprising amount of things accomplished and yet none of it felt rushed. I have a new "slow" strategy for Saturdays and Sundays in which I continue to wake up at 6am as I do on weekdays, but instead of hitting the shower right away, I make a cup of tea, crawl back into bed and read for four hours - purely pleasure reading; whatever takes my fancy. Then I'm up officially at 10am and the whole day still stretches in front of me. Reading children's literature is a particularly delightful way to start a weekend.
But I was also feeling a bit scholarly so I started dipping into a recent anthology that I've acquired - The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry edited by Tim Kendall. I read the essays dealing with women's war poetry, containing some of the usual blather about how women's poetry has been ignored in the canon because most of it wasn't very good and the genre is masculinely predicated on having actually fought at the front etc. etc. Simon Featherstone's essay on Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy was interesting in its argument for expanding the definition of war poetry to include "an exploratory aesthetics and politics that develop through unexpected, often understated experiences of wartime change." And a 
footnote in Stacy Gillis's overview essay led me scrambling to my WWI bookcase to dig out The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, edited by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. This is another anthology of interesting essays and Deborah Tyler-Bennett's look at women poets who used myths or folktales to critique the impact of war had me foraging for my Collected Poems 1912-1944 of H.D. (I really need to organize my bookcases) and making a note to find and read Edith Sitwell's poem "Clown's Houses" and the poetry of Iris Tree (who I know primarily as a subject in paintings by Bloomsberries) and Phyliss M'egroz (never previously heard of her). Hours worth of other interesting essays in both anthologies to read, so I'm keeping them at the ready on the bedside table.
y which contains a character who is a WWI poet. This led me to the previously unknown Black Spring Press, which not only publishes the trilogy, but also the works of Julian Maclaren-Ross, a writer I've been interested in since I read he was the inspiration for the writer X Trapnel, in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, one of my favourite books. In addition to ordering the Hamilton, I also bought a copy of Maclaren-Ross's Bitten By the Tarantula and Other Writing which includes short stories, some novellas and unpublished work, and a bunch of literary and film criticism. My books arrived at the post office on Friday night and I read his film essays, including one on the early films of Hitchcock - it has me itching to watch Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt. From the introduction to this collection, I also learned that Maclaren-Ross married a niece of Leonard Woolf. All roads apparently lead to Bloomsbury . . . 
ut Qualities (I've already finished Part One and am really enjoying it so far, so this at least seems entirely possible).
idewalks. It's interesting that both Woolf in 1931, and Nicholson in the 21st century, make reference to how commercial and crass the street is and point out that real Londoners avoid it. Not "refined" writes Woolf; "too popular" adds Nicholson, especially with the tourists. Well, yes - I always head there at least once when I'm in London. I like going to Selfridges and I rather enjoy the energy and bustle. Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look.
It was a pleasant enough read. Jo Bellamy is a garden designer who is commissoned to replicate the White Garden for a wealthy client - who also has romantic designs on her. She is intrigued by the history of Sissinghurst when she discovers that her grandfather Jock - who recently committed suicide - worked briefly as a gardener for the Nicholsons during the Second World War. When she visits the estate, Jo discovers - and borrows - half a notebook with Jock's name on it, but not his handwriting, found amongst the garden archives in a toolshed. The notebook is in the form of a diary, and she suspects it could be written by Virginia Woolf. Thus begins a madcap quest through Sotheby's, Oxford, Cambridge and Rodmell, to discover how and why, especially since the first entry takes place the day after Woolf walked into the River Ouse. Barron uses the three weeks between when Virginia left her farewell notes for Leonard and Vanessa, and when her body was found, to posit an entirely different set of events. Could Virginia, for example, have been murdered instead?
My new fall toy is a slow cooker that I bought this weekend and the first recipe I had to try was Boeuf en Daube. Now, this isn't exactly Mrs. Ramsay's version (or her cook's, I should say) which took three days to prepare. My recipe only needed the beef to marinate in wine and herbs overnight. I decided to omit the optional pig's trotter. The next day it was just a matter of cutting up the vegetables and popping it all into the crockpot.
